Int. J. Engng Ed. Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 305–313, 2010
Printed in Great Britain.
0949-149X/91 $3.00+0.00
# 2010 TEMPUS Publications.
From Beginning to End: How Engineering
Students Think and Talk About
Sustainability Across the Life Cycle*
DEBORAH KILGORE, ANDREW JOCUNS, KEN YASUHARA and CYNTHIA J. ATMAN
Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching, University of Washington, Box 352183, Seattle,
WA 98195-2180, USA. E-mail: kilgored@u.washington.edu. jocunsa@u.washington.edu.
yasuhara@u.washington.edu. atman@u.washington.edu.
In this mixed-methods longitudinal study, 64 engineering students participated in a 15-minute labbased engineering design task toward the end of their second and fourth years. Fifteen of those
students also participated in open-ended interviews in their senior year, in which they were asked
about their college experiences and conceptions of sustainable development. Analysis of these data
reveal that while the students often talked about sustainable development in terms of limited
resources and the life cycle of engineered products, relatively few considered the life cycle when
actually engaged in engineering design. An in-depth examination of four students’ educational
experiences, narratives about sustainable development, and performance on the engineering task
suggested implications for engineering education. Making sustainable development explicit in
engineering classrooms and facilitating the development of self-directed learning skills in engineering students should improve students’ abilities to develop knowledge about sustainable development and transfer such knowledge to new engineering contexts.
Keywords: design; sustainability; life cycle analysis; mixed methods research; undergraduates
thus situating an engineering effort in larger
contexts [4] as advocated by ABET. For instance,
the design of an automobile tire might be informed
by the target market’s product safety regulations,
material supply and product distribution chains,
and car ownership rates and driving habits. By
structuring an examination of the designed artifact
across time, life cycle can facilitate these broad
contextual considerations, e.g., governmental,
business, and cultural, respectively, in this case.
In Educating the Engineer of 2020, the NAE
recommends ‘student-centered education’ as one
cornerstone of engineering education reform [5].
Making education student-centered involves
recognition that students are principle actors in
the learning process, and teaching approaches
should be geared toward reaching students with
different learning preferences, histories, and
perspectives. Therefore, in considering how
sustainability concepts may be incorporated in
engineering education, we believe a good place to
begin is with students’ current conceptions of and
attitudes toward sustainability and sustainable
development.
In this paper, we present a mixed-methods study
of undergraduate engineering students talking
about sustainable development and considering
sustainability concepts across the life cycle during
engineering problem solving. We conclude with an
in-depth examination of the college experiences of
four students, to see where their preparation for
sustainable engineering, if any, came from.
Students’ conceptions of sustainable development,
1. INTRODUCTION
SUSTAINABLE ENGINEERING DESIGN
requires not only the technical skills necessary to
engineer solutions, but a broad vision of and sense
of responsibility for the impacts that engineered
solutions have on people and societies [1, 2]. ABET
accreditation standards speak to this need by calling for engineering programs to provide students
‘the broad education necessary to understand the
impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental and social context’ [3].
Furthermore, ABET aspires for students to
develop the ‘ability to design a system, component,
or process to meet desired needs within realistic
constraints such as economic, environmental,
social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability’ [3].
One way of introducing sustainability into engineering design is through life cycle analysis [1, 4].
An engineering solution’s life cycle includes all of
the inter-related stages of its existence, from
design, to implementation, to operations and
maintenance, and, ultimately, disposal. A life
cycle analysis facilitates comprehensive decisionmaking along many important dimensions, such as
environmental impact, cost, resource requirements, manufacturability, serviceability and
social impact. Additionally, considering an engineered solution’s complete life cycle can reveal its
relationships with other processes and systems,
* Accepted 10 November 2009.
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performance in engineering design with respect to
life cycle analysis, and educational experiences
related to sustainability inform our recommendations for incorporating sustainability in engineering education.
2. METHODOLOGY
The Academic Pathways Study (APS) is a multiinstitution, mixed-methods, longitudinal study
which examines engineering students’ learning
and development as they move into, through,
and beyond their undergraduate institutions
[6, 7]. It is part of the Center for the Advancement
of Engineering Education (CAEE), an NSFfunded higher education Center for Learning and
Teaching. The APS uses a concurrent triangulation mixed-methods design, in which both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed to
collect and analyze data. The integration of results
occurs during the interpretation phase [8]. Details
of the APS research design is documented elsewhere (see, e.g., [6, 7] ).
The present study examines how students think
and talk about sustainable development, as well as
the extent to which they consider the life cycle
while engaged in engineering design. Sixty-four
students across four institutions completed an
engineering design task in their second and
fourth years. Fifteen of those students at one of
the institutions, referred to here as Large Public
University (LPU), participated in a semi-structured, qualitative interview in their senior year, in
which they were asked to talk about sustainable
development and other concepts related to engineering. Questions about sustainable development
were posed to these students shortly after they had
completed the engineering design task.
Analysis of the students’ conceptions of sustainable development was accomplished in tandem
with coding of their written answers to the engineering design task. In the following sections, we
will describe findings from our analyses. First, we
will describe how students talked about sustainability and sustainable development in terms of
limited resources and life cycle. Second, we will
show the extent to which students considered life
cycle while solving an engineering design problem.
We will close by examining the learning experiences of four students who described their conceptions of sustainable development, to better
understand the link between learning and applying
the concept of sustainability and the implications
for engineering education.
3. FINDINGS
3.1 Students’ conceptions of sustainable
development
We were interested to learn the degree to which
the aspirations of policy makers had permeated the
students’ engineering education experience. Therefore, we asked students to respond to a quote from
the Engineer of 2020: ‘It is our aspiration that
engineers will continue to be leaders in the movement toward use of wise, informed, and economical sustainable development’ [5]. We then asked
students the following questions: (1) What do you
think they mean by ‘sustainable development?’ (2)
To what extent has your education provided
knowledge about sustainable development? (3)
How well prepared do you feel to contribute to
sustainable development?
Two overlapping themes dominated students’
responses to questions about sustainable development, and we coded them accordingly: limited
resources and life cycle. We assigned a code of
‘limited resources’ to a response when the participant offered a comprehension of sustainable development in which the world’s natural resources are
being over-mined, over-used, and as such are in
danger of depletion. We assigned a code of ‘life
cycle’ to a response in which the participant
referred in some way to a stage of the life cycle
of an engineered product—for example, the design
process, construction, maintenance, and disposal.
We considered all 15 students’ responses in terms
of these categories. The discussion following
reflects the entire range of responses.
In the following sections, we interpret limited
resources and life cycle as narratives or stories that
students tell about sustainable development. With
this analytic lens, we acknowledge that the ways
students talk about sustainable development
reflect the social, cultural, and educational
contexts in which they make meaning of their
lives [9].
3.2 Limited resources
In their explanations of sustainable development, eight of the 15 students discussed the Earth’s
limited resources. These responses ranged in richness and specificity, from rather vague responses to
more sophisticated ones that included specific
examples (e.g., reducing reliance on fossil fuels)
and/or were tied more explicitly to students’
experiences in engineering education.
Austin, a mechanical engineering major, articulated little understanding of sustainable development, other than ‘something that isn’t . . . going to
use up some resources in a short period of time . . .’
Samantha also explained sustainable development
in terms of limited resources. She referred to
‘green’ energy resources but appeared somewhat
unsure of her explanation, prefacing her remarks
with ‘I guess’ and ‘I don’t know.’
I guess like it makes me think of the green buildings
that can be sustained without too much energy
input . . . So they’re like—I don’t know if any of
these sound sustainable, but like they’re able to
continue operation using energy resources that
they’re—green energy resources, so like if they grew
plants on the top of their building or something to
do—to somehow reduce like the heating cost or
From Beginning to End
something . . .Um, I guess it’s just all in—a lot in the
materials that they use to build, so there’s less heat
escape or like, um—or like the solar panels or something.
Samantha was more specific than Austin, referring
to both energy conservation and an example of a
renewable energy source (solar) with respect to
‘green’ building. She also mentioned that she
became acquainted with green energy concepts
through an architecture course she took and not
from coursework in her major, bioengineering.
Drew, a chemical engineering major, was passionate in his opinion about people’s responsibility to
conserve the Earth’s resources.
Well, sustainable, we do not live a—in a sustainable
culture, and now we’re just milking this oil, the cheap
energy that’s coming out of the ground, and it’s not
sustainable, because it’s going to run out eventually,
or at least become—get to the point where it’s too
expensive—it’s too expensive. And when I think of
sustainable development, it’s something that won’t
run out, won’t become—I don’t want to say won’t
become obsolete, because eventually it will become
obsolete, but it won’t—man, I don’t know where to
go with that.
Drew connected human action and culture—‘milking this oil’—to his understanding of sustainability. Ethan took a similar stance, referring to the
fact that humans have already ‘paved over’ the
environment and that it is almost too late to save
it. ‘We talk about saving the environment, but if
people would actually research what the environment looked like 150 or 200 years ago, they’d
probably decide it’s a little too late to save it. It
is gone.’
Both Drew and Ethan expressed passion for
sustainability and situated sustainable development in human history, culture, and economic
systems, but Ethan went as far as to connect this
larger view with his motivation to become an
engineer. ‘I’m interested in energy systems, and, I
guess, I feel like there’s so much work to be done
switching people over from easy, cheap, moneymaking solutions to something that people can use
hundreds or thousands of years into the future.’
Ethan’s explanation of sustainable development
stresses limited resources but also takes a longer
view, suggesting that limited resources are part of a
larger puzzle: the life cycle of an engineered solution. We will describe this life cycle stance toward
sustainable development in the next section.
Jesse’s response offered two more components
to the limited resources stance, as he suggested that
it is not just humans who are to blame for
‘unsustainable cultures’ but also that engineers
are responsible for fixing the problems. Jesse is
unique among our respondents in identifying the
importance of sustaining intellectual resources. A
mechanical engineering major, he pointed out that
engineers cannot simply throw technology at a
problem, but rather must ensure that people
know how to use and maintain engineered
products throughout their useful life.
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Economic, sustainable development . . . it’s kind of
like helping people raise their own standard of living,
and I mean it’s kind of like the . . . ‘give a man a fish,
teach him how to fish’ difference, so it’s kind of like
giving people the—not giving people tools—like
describing through teaching people the tools to like,
you know, bring their own level of economic development up, and instead of just like flooding in new
technology or money, like just doing it in a smart and
more effective way . . .engineers are responsible for
increasing the standard of living for all levels, for all
people . . .
In sum, students’ conceptions of sustainability as
an issue of limited resources ranged from very
vague to rather promising in terms of demonstrating advanced knowledge, skills and attitudes about
sustainability and sustainable development. Their
narratives suggested varying degrees of sophistication in their conceptions of sustainable development as a question of limited resources. Some
students gave specific examples to illustrate the
concept of limited resources. Others situated their
discussion of limited resources within larger economic, environmental, global, and/or social
contexts. Jesse connected his discussion of limited
resources with the engineering profession, specifying an ethical principle that engineers should
follow in their work.
3.3 Life cycle
Responses to the sustainable development question that maintained a stance towards the future of
the product, not just the end of the design process,
we refer to as life cycle stances. Students took
sustainable development in the life cycle sense to
refer to the lifetime of a product, by taking into
account materials and design features that will
have positive effects upon the maintenance and
life of the product, as well as the world context in
which the product will be used. In discussing
sustainable development in terms of the life cycle,
Emily focused on efficiency, ‘Well, it just—it
means that, um, you don’t have to start over
every time you’re doing something. It means that
with maintenance and stuff, that our society can
keep—keep running, and you don’t have to just
wipe it out and start over again all the time.’ Like
Emily, Justin understood sustainable development
and the life cycle to be, at least in part, for the
purpose of efficiency and not ‘reinventing the
wheel.’ This understanding of the life cycle of
design reflects one of the dominant images of
engineering that were noticed in previous analyses
of undergraduate majors, who realized that they
would not be constantly designing new products
but extending or improving designs that are
already in existence [10].
Michael considered the engineering problem
solving process itself as the object of sustainable
development. Michael contrasted a process that is
‘solution oriented’ to a more ‘sustainable sort . . .
where when you develop the solution you think
about the long-term impacts and not just solving
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the problem in short-term.’ Taking the longer
view, engineers would be pragmatic, ‘probably
developing solutions that are useful instead of
just impressive.’
For some students, in addition to considering
the larger context of an engineering design problem, it also was important to consider life cycle
within the more immediate context. For example,
Amanda said, ‘[Y]ou want to move away from
depletable resources and move towards renewable
resources, things that won’t pollute the environment and [are] economically sustainable. You have
to sort of cater to a region, like it wouldn’t make
sense to use solar panels in Washington, or at least
in Seattle or something.’ Justin considered another
kind of immediate context—that presented by his
major in computer science and engineering—as he
explained his understanding of life cycle assessment and sustainability.
The closest thing [sustainable development] would be
related to, would be reusing old code, which means
someone has probably already written what you want
to do, so—and they’ve probably also packaged it into
a library that you can freely use, which means you
don’t have to rewrite everything. You just have to
plug in their stuff and start using it, and that’s
sustainable because if you’re not reinventing the
wheel every time, you actually—you don’t discover
the same bugs, you don’t waste the same development
time . . . Like if you have the domain knowledge, you
know these things exist. You know you don’t have to
reinvent that wheel.
Kara, a mechanical engineering major, gave a
detailed explanation of how sustainable development involves ‘our ability to analyze the life cycle
of a product and how from beginning to end it—it
affects society.’
So it’s not just how much it costs to produce but how
much it costs to get rid of it when you’re through
with it, and how we can design in the first place to
make it more usable when it’s through or to allow it to
be used for energy to produce more products or to be
recycled . . . and just like in this whole ‘let’s reduce
carbon emissions’ issue, looking at, again, the life
cycle of the solutions and, you know, is it more
effective to burn paper, to make new paper out of
trees rather than trying to recycle it, is it more energy
efficient . . . So in terms of energy and products and
waste, and even independence in, for instance, housing design, you know, coming up with new materials
and new methods of production that allow development to be more independent and self-sufficient and
fair use of energy and so forth . . . Um, understanding
what their priorities are and how your solution will
affect them in kind of a life-cycle sort of a way from
beginning to end will help improve the engineering of
the future.
Kara’s life cycle stance towards sustainable development was more complex than a simple projection of a designed product into the future, and
contains several qualities that signify a relatively
sophisticated understanding of sustainable development and more specifically, life cycle analysis.
First, Kara situated sustainable development in a
societal context. Second, Kara offered a specific
example of decision-making using life cycle analysis. Third, Kara connected sustainable development to the design work that engineers do,
introducing the human element in the latter part
of her response by referring to how engineers must
take into account users and their priorities.
Though the above narratives varied in detail and
richness, they tended to be more connected to the
engineering design process than the limited
resources narratives. Students’ explanations of
sustainable development in terms of life cycle
analysis tended to include engineering design
concepts and the design process itself. These
concepts included efficient design processes, more
pragmatic design decisions for the long run, and
gathering information about users’ priorities. It is
useful to note that the questions about sustainable
development posed during the interview occurred
after students had engaged in a 15-minute engineering design task. Perhaps students who
connected sustainable development to engineering
design may have been influenced by the order of
questions. However, many students did not
connect the two, which suggests that the order of
activities in the interview was not a substantial
factor in shaping students’ responses. In the next
section, we discuss how students addressed issues
of sustainability, and more specifically life cycle,
while doing that engineering design task.
3.4 Students’ application of sustainable
development concepts in engineering design
To complement our interview-based understanding of how engineering students talk about
sustainable development, we also analyzed data
generated from students engaged in an engineering
design task. Students were presented with the same
design task in their second and fourth years of
undergraduate study (2004–2005 and 2006–2007
academic years). The 15 interview participants at
Large Public University who are the main focus of
this paper were among the longitudinal sample of
64 students across the four institutions for whom
we have paired second- and fourth-year design
task data. LPU was overrepresented in the
sample, with 41% of participants. The other pseudonymous institutions were Technical Public Institution, Urban Private University, and Suburban
Private University, with 19%, 16%, and 25% of
participants, respectively. Women were oversampled and represented just under half of the
sample.
We collected written responses to four openended questions about designing a way for pedestrians to cross a busy street intersection [11]. The
street crossing design task was administered on
paper with a 15-minute time limit and opened with
a brief description of the problem scenario:
As an engineer, you have been asked to solve a
problem on the State University campus. Just like
campuses across the country, the State University
campus is often overcrowded with pedestrians cross-
From Beginning to End
ing the streets. One busy intersection on campus is the
crossing of Fifth Ave. in front of the bookstore.
Dangers at this intersection include heavy traffic
and busses which run against the general traffic flow
(see diagram below). The University would like to
design a cost effective method for students to cross
Fifth Ave. which would reduce the possibility of
accidents at this intersection. You have been assigned
to design a solution to this problem for presentation
to the University Traffic Committee.
The description was accompanied by a diagram of
the intersection and was followed by four, openended questions, each intended to focus on a
specific design activity:
(1) What is the problem as you see it?
(2) List potential solution(s) for this problem.
(3) From your list in Question 2, choose the
potential solution you think is best and provide
a detailed evaluation of your solution.
(4) What kinds of additional information would
help you solve this problem?
In this paper, we focus on an analysis of responses
to Questions (2) and (3) that examines the extent to
which students considered sustainability when
evaluating potential solutions in the street crossing
design task. (Although only Question (3) asks for
solution evaluation, many students began evaluating potential solutions while listing them in their
Question (2) responses, so we decided to include
both in this analysis.) Responses were coded
according to a scheme inspired by life cycle analysis, a tool commonly used to assess an artifact or
system’s environmental, economic, and social
impact at each stage of its lifetime. Our coding
scheme recognizes four stages of a designed solution’s lifetime, listed in chronological order:
current state, design/construction, solution
in place, and maintenance/disposal. A brief
description of each code is given in Table 1.
Coding a participant’s responses involved a yes/
no judgment for each stage, depending on whether
the responses included evidence of consideration of
the stage. A detailed set of coding guidelines was
refined until two researchers were able to independently code with agreement for at least 80% of
participants. Disagreements were negotiated to
consensus. The findings reflect how broadly
309
students considered life cycle when completing
the street crossing design task.
Since Questions (2) and (3) both explicitly
requested that potential solutions be listed and
evaluated, all participants’ responses ended up
being coded ‘yes’ for the solution in place code.
The code is described above for the sake of
completeness but was not analyzed. In contrast,
we expected relatively few students to consider
design/construction and maintenance/disposal
in describing and evaluating potential solutions, at
least in their second year. We hoped that this might
change after two years of engineering study.
Indeed, as second-year undergraduates, only
about a quarter of the 64-student sample considered each of current state and design/
construction in their responses, and even fewer
considered maintenance/disposal. Most of the
response text described solutions in their fully
constructed state and did not discuss the duration,
complexity, or resource requirements of the
design or construction stages in the life cycle.
With respect to maintenance/disposal, few participants appeared to consider the need for physical
structures such as pedestrian bridges (the most
commonly proposed solution in both years) to be
inspected and repaired for safety. Given the same
design task two years later, the students’ responses
did not change significantly with respect to life
cycle considerations. A modestly larger number of
students considered design/construction, but
none of the changes between Years 2 and 4 were
statistically significant. Full coding results are
shown in Table 2.
Although Large Public University was overrepresented in the sample, findings for participants
at this institution were not statistically significantly
different from those for the remainder of the
sample, suggesting that the overrepresentation
did not substantially skew the aggregate findings.
The 15 LPU students who also participated in the
interview did not differ substantially from the rest
of the sample with respect to consideration of life
cycle.
Overall, engineering students appear to evaluate
solutions to the street crossing design task by
imagining the complete solution in place. Most
students in our sample did not consider other
important stages in their solutions’ life cycles,
Table 1. The four codes for consideration of life cycle in responses to Question (2) and (3) of the street crossing design task
Life cycle stage code
Description
current state
consideration of the problem scenario or circumstances before design or construction of a
solution begins
design/construction
consideration of the process (vs. outcome) of design/construction of a solution; includes ease/
simplicity of construction but excludes general references to overall project cost (See solution
in place.)
consideration of a solution as installed and operating normally, after construction is complete;
outcome (vs. process) of design/construction
consideration of maintenance, modification, removal, or disposal of a solution; includes
consideration of solution life span
solution in place
maintenance/disposal
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D. Kilgore et al.
Table 2. Number and percentage of longitudinal sample (N =
58) whose Question (2) and (3) responses discussed each of
the four life cycle stages, as coded in our study. None of the
changes from Year 2 to 4 were statistically significant
Year 2
current state
design/construction
solution in place
maintenance/disposal
32
15
58
10
(55%)
(26%)
(100%)*
(17%)
Year 4
22
25
58
12
(38%)
(43%)
(100%)*
(17%)
* Both questions asked specifically about solutions, so all
students were expected to consider this stage; these statistics
are included for completeness.
with less than half considering the design/construction process and fewer still looking ahead to longterm maintenance or disposal. Notably, our longitudinal analysis suggests that two years of studying engineering did not prepare students to
consider life cycle more broadly. This limited
consideration of life cycle is particularly notable,
given the nature of the street crossing design task
and that students commonly selected solution
approaches involving substantial physical infrastructure (e.g., pedestrian bridge). Life cycle is
well-suited for comprehensive evaluation for
criteria that are particularly important to projects
of this nature, such as cost and safety, not to
mention environmental impact.
To better understand the relationships among
engineering students’ conceptions of sustainable
development, their educational experiences, and
their consideration of life cycle during the design
process, we next take a closer, more holistic look at
the experiences, stories, and behaviors of four
distinctive students in our sample of 15 at Large
Public University.
3.5 The link between learning experiences and
conceptions of sustainable development in
engineering: A tale of four students
In the previous discussion, we considered
dominant ways that students talked about sustainable development and how they performed on an
engineering design task with respect to sustainable
development as instantiated in life cycle analysis.
In this section, we shift our lens to the students
themselves in order to raise such questions as
(1) Where do students’ conceptions of sustainable
development come from? (2) What educational
experiences would help students to gain a more
sophisticated understanding of sustainable development? and (3) What educational experiences and
conceptions of sustainable development are
accompanied by broad consideration of the life
cycle while engaged in engineering design? We
present four case studies of students discussing
their learning experiences within and beyond engineering classrooms. These case studies illustrate
the variety of learning experiences that students
may have had that introduced them to notions of
sustainability and the life cycle. Students them-
selves identified a variety of learning experiences to
be significant and/or relevant to their understanding of sustainable development: internships, coops, work in research laboratories, and extracurricular and co-curricular activities.
The four students described here represent the
range of responses to the sustainable development
questions and the street crossing design task. We
juxtapose short descriptions of students’ learning
experiences and conceptions of sustainable development with their responses to the engineering
design task, with the intention of drawing attention to how the variety of their individual experiences associated with an engineering education
program could in some way influence their ability
to respond to the engineering design task.
Jesse
Jesse is a socially conscious engineering student
who has participated in alternative spring breaks
through Hillel (a Jewish student organization) and
Engineers Without Borders. It should come as no
surprise that his comprehension of engineering as a
field of study and a profession are both shaped by
his social consciousness. As a mechanical engineer
who defines engineering as a ‘noble pursuit to
provide . . . community and the world with
safety and improve the standard of living’ of the
world’s people, Jesse contends that engineers must
be prepared to handle large challenges. It is worth
noting that when we asked Jesse to describe the
most significant learning experience that he had as
an undergrad, he mentioned his Hillel experience
in Nicaragua, which became a significant service
experience for him. Aside from his experience with
Engineers Without Borders and in Nicaragua,
Jesse had two internships as a mechanical engineer
working on designs. Jesse believes that he is
prepared to tackle the NAE’s sustainable development aspirations for the engineer of 2020, yet Jesse
adds that his exposure to the qualities entailed in
those aspirations did not occur inside the engineering curriculum. Rather, his comprehension of
social sciences, humanities, economics and sustainable development has been nurtured through his
work in Engineers Without Borders and his overall
social consciousness. In discussing the required
skills of an engineer, Jesse mentioned that he had
several difficult experiences working in teams.
Jesse’s comprehension of sustainable development,
which we introduced in the previous section, highlighted a dimension that neither NAE nor the
United Nations’ [12] definition of sustainable
development explicitly recognized: that limited
resources include intellectual resources. That is to
say, Jesse appears to interpret ‘sustainable
resources’ more broadly than in the NAE’s aspirations. Jesse’s consideration of life cycle in engineering asserts that the maintenance of sustainable
projects includes developing the intellectual
resources necessary for a community to become
self-sufficient with respect to the engineering solution at hand.
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Emphasizing self-sufficiency as a goal in assisting developing communities suggests an ability to
take the ‘long view,’ considering the long-term
efficacy of a solution. In contrast, Jesse’s responses
for the street crossing design task lack such
forward-looking considerations. In terms of the
life cycle coding, his evaluation of potential solutions did discuss the design and construction stage
of the life cycle but not maintenance and disposal.
Elizabeth
During four years at Large Public University
enrolled as a computer science and engineering
major, Elizabeth has had three internships with
both large and small companies and two research
projects on campus working with faculty. At each
of her internships, she was given a mentor and has
kept in touch with some of them. She has also
sought advice from graduate students with whom
she has worked on the research projects. As a
student who has had the opportunity to have
multiple internships and research projects, it is
interesting to consider Elizabeth’s opinions on
these two disparate aspects of engineering. Elizabeth enjoyed working in industry more than
research primarily because in industry she enjoyed
having a final product that would be implemented.
‘In research,’ Elizabeth contends, ‘you don’t really
know what’s gonna happen. You’re just trying to
look for an answer and a solution, and then you
don’t know what the end result is gonna be.’
Despite having had experience in both industry
and research, Elizabeth did not exhibit a strong
comprehension of sustainability and the life cycle
in design. Furthermore, consistent with Elizabeth’s
apparent lack of a clear understanding of sustainable development, her responses to the street crossing design task did not consider life cycle very
broadly. Her evaluation of solutions considered
traffic flow and pedestrian safety but neither the
construction process nor maintenance issues.
Perhaps her choice of words in describing her
industry experience, where there is an ‘end
result,’ indicates a temporally narrow scope that
hampers consideration of what happens to a
product or system once deployed or released to a
customer or market.
Kara
As a mechanical engineering major, Kara
believed that some important skills for engineers
to have were the ability to network and communicate with other people, and the ability to gather a
variety of information on one’s own while working
on engineering designs. This latter skill can be
referred to as self-directed learning. Kara
mentioned that she acquired self-directed learning
skills both while working in her two internships at
large engineering firms, and while enrolled in a
course at Large Public University called ‘Sustainable Development,’ in which she worked on a
project that involved a real-world engineering
problem. Kara mentioned her senior design
311
capstone course as the most significant learning
experience she had had at Large Public University.
For her capstone, Kara worked in a group of three
to research, design, and implement a project for an
actual client, and she related that the experience
was especially important because ‘there was no
other way to go about it, other than to kind of
throw you off the end of the dock and say, okay,
we’ve given you all the tools, now go use them.’
Given her experience in the sustainable design
course, capstone work, and internships, it is not
very surprising that Kara had very sophisticated
responses to the questions we asked about sustainable development, where she was able to introduce
some notions from the life cycle of design into her
response.
Accordingly, Kara’s street crossing design task
responses stood out within the sample by demonstrating broad consideration of the life cycle. Her
responses detailed the design process, suggesting
both a preparatory study of traffic patterns and a
trial implementation of new light timings before
finalizing a solution. She also discussed the possibility of her proposed solution being adapted or
even replaced, if it proved ineffective in the long
run. Kara’s formative experiences with respect to
sustainability helped her develop self-directed
learning skills and probably account for her
sophisticated conceptions of sustainability and
broad consideration of the life cycle during engineering design.
Matthew
Matthew is an aeronautical and aerospace engineering major who had no internship experiences
but did have research experience in an aerospace
lab. In the lab, Matthew learned to design and
machine parts and obtained hands-on experience
about processes and theories that he was learning
in class. As such, Matthew defined working in this
aerospace lab as his most significant learning
experience, because he was able to apply theoretical concepts that he was learning in a class he was
taking concurrently while working in the lab. ‘We
learn about this stuff in lecture and it’s all kind of
theoretical and out there, and then go to the lab
and I can actually like look at the data and see this
is real. . . . So it was cool in that regard.’ While he
was working in the lab, Matthew also developed
relationships with two faculty members who
became his mentors, guiding and advising him on
his coursework and his future aspirations to attend
graduate school and continue his studies in the
aerospace field. Despite Matthew’s hands-on
experience working in the laboratory, he did not
include aspects of the life cycle in his responses on
sustainable development. As noted previously,
Matthew referred to sustainable development as
relating to the environment in some manner. At
the same time, Matthew introduced the idea that
engineering should be socially responsible.
As in Elizabeth’s case, Matthew’s vague and
limited discussion of sustainable development
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D. Kilgore et al.
was accompanied by a set of street crossing design
task responses with limited consideration of life
cycle. He considered neither the design and
construction processes nor maintenance and disposal, shaping his decision-making process in terms
of trade-offs between the current state of the
intersection and his proposed solution in place.
Given their industry internship experience, both
Matthew and Elizabeth’s cases might point to a
missed opportunity to impress upon engineering
undergraduates the importance of the temporally
broad view that life cycle analysis and considerations of sustainability can facilitate.
4. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS
In this mixed-methods longitudinal study, we
asked students to talk about sustainable development, and also analyzed their performance on an
engineering design task to see if they incorporated
issues of sustainability across the life cycle in their
approach to engineering design. We found that
while students often talked about sustainable
development in terms of limited resources and
the life cycle of engineered products, relatively
few considered the life cycle when actually engaged
in engineering design.
In taking the limited resources stance, a student
may have considered sustainable development to be
an important aspect of engineering; Ethan saw it as
a motivation to become an engineer and Jesse saw
limited resources as a set of problems for which
engineers are responsible to solve. At the same time,
acknowledgement of limited resources alone may
not be adequate for full consideration of sustainability in engineering design. As evidenced in most
life cycle narratives, limited resources are but one
facet of a life cycle framework.
The life cycle stance seemed to offer students
greater opportunity to discuss engineering design
concepts more explicitly. Other students who
discussed the life cycle connected it with engineering design. Amanda referred to design constraints
introduced by the local, natural environment and
Justin described sustainable development and life
cycle within the specific context of his engineering
sub-discipline. Michael considered the life cycle as
integral to the engineering problem-solving
process, and Kara described how gathering information about user priorities would be an important element of life cycle analysis.
An in-depth look at four of the students in this
study illustrates how learning about sustainability
is or is not transferred to performance on new
engineering design problems. Jesse and Kara both
had a broad range of learning experiences that
introduced them to concepts of sustainability, yet
Kara articulated a more sophisticated understanding of sustainability, and only Kara performed as
well on the street crossing task as one might expect,
given her experiences. One distinction that we can
make between how these two students understood
their learning experiences is in Kara’s focus on the
value of being capable of self-directed learning;
that is, being able to identify what one needs to
know, make a plan for how to learn it, and seek
out and find relevant learning resources [13]. The
development of skills necessary to direct one’s own
learning may account for the difference in Kara
and Jesse’s abilities to process their experiences
into conceptions of sustainability that may be
transferred and applied to novel situations.
Another distinction lies in the preconceptions
students bring to the question of sustainability.
Jesse’s focus on ensuring that communities become
self-sufficient in terms of knowing how to operate
and maintain engineered products may have closed
off his ability and inclination to learn new concepts
that speak to limited resources and other aspects of
the life cycle (see, e.g., [14] ). Furthermore, Jesse
perceived that his preparation to incorporate
sustainable development in engineering practice
did not come from his formal engineering education, but rather from external opportunities for
service learning. This disconnect between knowing
and doing may be a product of Jesse’s understanding of his engineering education where
sustainability was not addressed, in contrast to
the real (in his case, third) world where sustainability is the focus. The street crossing problem
may have appeared to him more like the homework problems he solved for his classes than the
development problems he solved in communities
abroad. This case supports an argument for
making sustainability and sustainable development
concepts explicit in engineering classrooms and
curricula, enabling students to transfer these
concepts back and forth between simulated and
real-world learning contexts.
Like Kara, Elizabeth had a broad range of
applied learning experiences but was unable to
offer any definition of sustainable development at
all, nor did she consider the broad life cycle in the
street crossing problem. Her preference for an ‘end
result’ may imply a preconception about engineering design that is limited to the solution in place,
rather than the entire life cycle of an engineered
product. Matthew’s vague conception of sustainable development, accompanied by limited consideration of the life cycle during engineering design,
may also have been a product of his preconceptions
about engineering design and sustainability.
Matthew limited his discussion of sustainable development to natural environmental issues. He might
have been unaware of the importance of these issues
in aerospace design, leading him to regard sustainability and the life cycle to be irrelevant to engineering design in the context of his major.
Facilitating the development of self-directed
learning skills and the ability to critically reflect
on one’s experiences may improve students’ abilities to form conceptions of sustainability and
incorporate them into their engineering design
practices. Engineering educators and program
planners should work not only to make sustain-
From Beginning to End
ability explicit in engineering curricula, but also to
provide opportunities for students to develop selfdirected learning and critical reflection skills, to
encourage the transfer and use of knowledge about
sustainable development in a variety of contexts.
Acknowledgements—This material is based on work supported
by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ESI-
313
0227558, which funds the Center for the Advancement of
Engineering Education (CAEE). CAEE is a collaboration of
five partner universities: Colorado School of Mines, Howard
University, Stanford University, University of Minnesota, and
University of Washington. We would also like to acknowledge
Yi-Min Huang and Andrew Morozov for their earlier contributions to this project, as well as Joseph Douglas, Angela Du,
Johanna Hayenga, Laura Julich, and Charlene Reyes for their
efforts coding design task data.
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Deborah Kilgore is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for
Engineering Learning and Teaching and is also a research team member for the Center
for the Advancement of Engineering Education’s Academic Pathways Study.
Andrew Jocuns is a research scientist and team member for the Center for the Advancement
of Engineering Education’s Academic Pathways Study.
Ken Yasuhara is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for
Engineering Learning and Teaching and is also a research team member for the Center
for the Advancement of Engineering Education’s Academic Pathways Study.
Cynthia J. Atman is the founding director of the University of Washington’s Center for
Engineering Learning and Teaching. She is also the principal investigator and director of
the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education.